The Pass-Through of Commodity Prices to Consumer Prices of Selected Products

Fabio Rumler

Monetary Policy & the Economy, 2012, issue 1, 92–104

Abstract: This contribution analyzes the pass-through of various commodity prices to consumer prices of selected products in Austria. For this purpose, consumer price microdata for the period from 1996 to 2009 are mapped to the underlying disaggregated commodity prices. The duration and extent of the pass-through are found to vary considerably across products. While changes in crude oil prices turned out to have a quite substantial and quick effect on the consumer prices of super gasoline and diesel, the pass-through was rather weak for bread (bread rolls) and meat (beef steak). Of all products analyzed here, natural gas had the slowest price response, as its retail price is still partly government-controlled in Austria. Since the introduction of euro banknotes and coins in January 2002, the pass-through has increased significantly for most products under review, but we cannot infer a clear casual relationship from this result as other factors might also be responsible for the observed increase in the pass-through. In addition, the pass-through to retail prices is found to be stronger for cost hikes than for cost cuts for fuel and meat products (notably beef steak). This confirms the result of an asymmetric pass-through for fuel products found in earlier studies.

Keywords: pass-through; micro prices; commodity prices; consumer prices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 E11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.oenb.at/dam/jcr:19a2b3e2-a382-416c-8a4 ... us7_tcm16-246793.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:onb:oenbmp:y:2012:i:1:b:7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Documentation Management and Communications Services, Otto-Wagner Platz 3, A-1090 Vienna, Austria

Access Statistics for this article

Monetary Policy & the Economy is currently edited by Gerhard Fenz and Maria Teresa Valderrama

More articles in Monetary Policy & the Economy from Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank) P.O. Box 61, A-1011 Vienna, Austria. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rita Glaser-Schwarz ().